I feel like since October 7th I can either have no words to say anything or it all comes pouring out and I can't write less than thousands at a time.

I'm not really sure how suddenly it's all these months later, how did it get to be spring when it's still autumn?

So many weeks and months of funeral after funeral, friends burying children and grandchildren. Weeks when it was almost a relief to go to the funeral of a beloved elderly relative who'd died in old age of complications of Alzheimer's. We were heartbroken to lose her but took comfort that it was the natural order of things for children to bury a parent. 

Friends who's children have spent weeks and months in the ICU with blown off limbs or gut-wrenching headwounds.

Friends who's kids survived the slaughter at the Nova dance festival. Friends who survived the attacks on their kibbutzim. Friends who's family or friends are still being held hostage in Gaza 190 days later and no one knows if they are alive or dead. 

Schools struggling to function with masses of teachers amongst the hundreds of thousands called up in an emergency army draft. A teacher returned from months of reserve duty with shaking hands. Another still learning to walk again months after being wounded in the fighting.

Weeks and weeks when going out to volunteer in agriculture meant open fields and orchards with no shelters but overhead the regular boom of rockets fired into Israel and the thunder of distant and sometimes not so distant artillery firing back at launch sites.

Israeli agriculture was one of the targets of the October 7th attacks, farmers and farm workers massacred and kidnapped to Gaza, farms burnt, cow sheds and henhouse torched. Months later going south with thousands of other Israelis to help out as farmers try to rebuild and there are still burnt patches by the verges, groves of burnt trees even as fields are verdant again from winter rains, covering over much of the destruction of October. 

In the face of all of this who has the stomach to write of food? 

And yet it turns out that food has been so much a part of this war as a civilian. The first few weeks there was a run on the supermarkets. No, not panic buying, but ordinary citizens seeing how overwhelmed the authorities were and stepping in to fill that gap. At one shopping centre near me people set up food collection for refugees. At another they were collecting sanitary items. Outside shops teens stood with boxes asking shoppers to contribute snacks and shelf stable items to stock refreshment stands on main roads in support of first responders with no time to take food breaks. Another centre focused on aid packages for people unable for whatever reason to leave towns under bombardment, keeping them fed when it was too dangerous for them to leave their shelters. 

Caterers, restaurants and private individuals turned their kitchens over to feeding whomever needed to be fed: refugees, families of wounded, emergency services, hundreds of thousands of reservists called up with no notice and rushing to the front.  People volunteered to drive all this down to the front near the Gaza border, even with the constant rockets and sirens and in the first few weeks the continued threat of terrorist incursions. 

Ordinary civilians just doing anything they could to help, to support, to comfort, to nourish.